we need to spend less time like Thomas More drafting out all the details of a future libertarian utopia, right down to the food and architecture, and spend more time talking to our neighbors and figuring out ways of cooperating and getting along without the state telling us what to do.

Truly beautiful piece about (very personal) challenges in making connections between Americans and Nigerians:https://t.co/zp5ZotEr8o

‘it ain’t what we don’t know that causes trouble, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so’ (and if you know that sage was Mark Twain, then what you know ain’t so either).

Yet that would have achieved nothing except an increase in the error rate, due to increased numbers of glitches in the more complex machinery. Similarly, the humans, given different instructions but no hardware changes, would have been capable of emulating every detail of the

what if increase error is needed

Similarly, the humans, given different instructions but no hardware changes, would have been capable of emulating every detail of the Difference Engine’s method — and doing so would have been just as perverse. It would not have copied the Engine’s main advantage, its accuracy, which was due to hardware not software. I

again... not human.. no?

Experiencing boredom was one of many cognitive tasks at which the Difference Engine would have been hopelessly inferior to humans

Nor was it capable of knowing or proving, as Babbage did, that the two algorithms would give identical results if executed accurately. Still less was it capable of wanting, as he did,to benefit seafarers and humankind in general.

But it is the other camp’s basic mistake that is responsible for the lack of progress. It was a failure to recognise that what distinguishes human brains from all other physical systems is qualitatively different from all other functionalities, and cannot be specified in the way that all other attributes of computer programs can be. It cannot be programmed by any of the techniques that suffice for writing any other type of program. Nor can it be achieved merely by improving their performance at tasks that they currently do perform, no matter by how muc

could I have ‘extrapolated’ that there would be such a sharp departure from an unbroken pattern of experiences, and that a never-yet-observed process (the 17,000-year interval) would follow? Because it is simply not true that knowledge comes from extrapolating repeated observations. Nor is it true that ‘the future is like the past’, in any sense that one could detect in advance without already knowing the explanation. The future is actually unlike the past in most ways

Thrilled to see @davidgraeber's UTOPIA OF RULES on @flavorwire's excellent list of 10 Must Read Books for February.http://t.co/fit8jzfZfI

hello.

you blog holds my latest finds/thoughts/ramblings. not intended for normal edu-blogger consumption or modeling.lookdirectly below for our collection of more orderly-random (chaordic) thinking... if you are so inclined...